Donovan’s World

Despite a continuous tourist onslaught, Arrowtown, unlike Queenstown, is unspoilt.

Two uniquely paintable churches survive enhanced from its gold town origins. The first, St. Paul’s, is a plain porch and nave Anglican affair in timber built in 1871, just nine years after the first gold was found in the Arrow River.

Stained-glass memorial windows were added in 1973 and 1992 apart from which the pretty church is unchanged from the day it opened.

Across Berkshire Street is the Presbyterian St John’s. This is the note I made in my sketchbook: ‘Superb! Framed between enormous wellingtonias and mellowly glowing from sunlight reflected off the forecourt. If there were nothing else in Arrowtown those wellingtonias, planted around 1880, would be worth coming to see; and they allowed me to render a special emphasis of contrast to the intriguing 1873 stone church. The stones of St. John’s were dressed and laid by Chinese miners and its timbers came from near Glenorchy at the alpine end of Lake Wakatipu.’

© DON DONOVAN
  
donovan@ihug.co.nz

Like the Curate’s Egg parts of Cromwell are interesting; other parts, like the old main road, disappear into newly formed Lake Dunstan, victims of the Clyde Dam hydroelectric project of 1992.

From the lookout above the town at the northern end of Cromwell Gorge the pink tiled roof of the handsome Church of Mary Immaculate and the Irish Martyrs is very distinctive among those higher buildings that survived.

It has the longest name of all the churches in this book and I can add little more than to quote from the board outside the church: ‘…The foundation stone … was laid on March 17th 1908 … The church was built by Patrick Thomas and the stonemason was William Gair … cost £2400. The church was blessed and opened by Bishop Verdon on April 18th 1909. Father Hunt gave the church its unusual title to gain the support of the many Catholic Irish miners in Cromwell at that time…’

© DON DONOVAN
 
donovan@ihug.co.nz

I wrote and illustrated Country Churches of New Zealand. It was published in 2002 by New Holland, Publishers and is still on sale in bookshops. The publishers have kindly agreed to me re-publishing some of the book’s images and descriptions in this blog.

The town of St. Bathans had such a fabulously rich goldfield that miners turned what was once a 120m hill into what is now the flooded crater of the 50m deep Blue Lake.

St Patrick’s was built in 1892 for Catholics and has a ’stone lasts forever’ look about it that contrasts with corrugated iron St Alban’s up the road. A misleading impression, for like the nearby Vulcan Hotel, it is built of sun-dried mud brick.

I did my work in the churchyard on a chilly spring morning, my feet in dew-wet grass and periwinkle but as I sketched, the sun picked its way across the tombstones and lit up a magnificent horse chestnut in full bloom, probably as old as the church.

© DON DONOVAN 
 
donovan@ihug.co.nz

I wrote and illustrated Country Churches of New Zealand. It was published in 2002 by New Holland, Publishers and is still on sale in bookshops. The publishers have kindly agreed to me re-publishing some of the book’s images and descriptions in this blog.

Near derelict and deserted, its dark nave a dump for old mattresses, St Patrick’s now stands like a forlorn folly among tall pines.
 
It was de-consecrated around 1998, but its origin is unclear. It dates at least from 1882 for it appears in an apparently accurate watercolour painting of Macraes township dated January 1883.

It was built of plaster-rendered local schist with Oamaru stone facings and is, apart from its decay, unaltered from its original state. One wonders what its fate will be now that it and its auriferous land are owned by a gold mining company.

© DON DONOVAN 
 
donovan@ihug.co.nz

Louis Faigan opened his first store in Millers Flat in 1896 in a one-roomed shop leased from a watchmaker. Three years later he bought the boarding house on today’s site, turned the front into a store and the back into living quarters, and that’s the way it stayed until fire destroyed it in 1936 and the ‘moderne’ store was erected.

In gold-mining days Faigan’s supplied goods by pack horse to remote diggers, and by horse and cart to the dredge workers on the Clutha as well as to local farmers and residents. Sensitive always to customers’ needs, Faigan even imported ginger and rice for the Chinese miners, and this service philosophy was exemplified in his slogan, ‘Everything from a needle to an anchor’.

The old man died in 1910, and Leopold Faigan, who had started work in his father’s shop in 1899, carried on the business until shortly before his death in 1976. The store stayed in the Faigan family until 1980.

Malcolm and Lesley James closed the store in 1989, but within forty-eight hours, $30,000 was raised from about a hundred households to buy the stock and plant. The enterprise has been owned by community shareholders ever since, with Judith Omond as manager.

© DON DONOVAN

According to the histories, Arrowtown came into being in 1862, which is also the date of claimed establishment of the store. But Robert Pritchard was not the first storekeeper, and the shops were not set up in Buckingham Street until after the flood of 1863.

John Hamilton, who now runs the store, believes that Pritchard probably ‘established’ his first store in a tent on the river beach. I surmise that the store you see today was built a little later, when the future of the town had become more assured.

John’s father, Alexander, still takes great interest in the affairs of the store, and they both insist on operating it in the spirit of the traditional general store.

Within the two-foot-thick walls of this solid old building a lot of memorabilia have accumulated, including a magnificent set of brass scales that tourists regularly try to buy. Tourism is now the heart of Arrowtown’s economy and is the major reason why the store will never suffer the depredations of overt ‘modernisation’.

Alexander Hamilton worked in the store for Rattray & Son from 1952 and bought the business from them in 1965, but the Hamilton family is as old as Arrowtown. They intermarried with the Cotters, one of the first three families in the district, and John’s grandmother, Mrs Alex. Hamilton, a Cotter by birth, wrote an often quoted historical monograph titled ‘Notes on Early Arrowtown’.

‘We’ve still got that at home’ says John. ‘We call it “The Black Book”’.

© DON DONOVAN

MITCHELLS’ COTTAGE, FRUITLANDS

Central Otago is one big builder’s yard, a colossal litter of a remarkable construction material from which every conceivable type of building has been erected since European immigrants moved across the face of the land.

It’s that fine-grained, metamorphic rock called schist, in whose lasagne-layers wink and sparkle promises of Central Otago’s mineral wealth. It’s a stone that will split but not break across its grain, wonderfully suitable, in a variety of lengths and thicknesses, for horizontally-raised cottage walls, door and window lintels, quoins, chimney breasts and stacks, and even the odd roof, it makes walls and fence posts, bridges and cattle troughs, and even in its unquarried state it provided overhangs and cave-like niches for itinerant gold seekers stranded in winter’s fury. Artistically it’s a gemstone, providing texture and form to tempt the pen, and offering to the palette the rich ochres, browns and greys of the lichened landscape from which it springs.

Completed in 1904, Mitchells’ Cottage at Fruitlands, above the winding highway from Alexandra to Roxburgh, is an outstanding example of the drystone mason’s craft. It was built with painstaking skill, each stone carefully considered and cut so precisely that no mortar was used or needed. It was made by men who knew of no other way to work - no short cuts, no shoddiness - simply the best.

From the Shetland Islands by way of the Australian goldfields Andrew Mitchell arrived in New Zealand in 1866, followed by his brother John in 1872. They worked around the Otago goldfields until, in the 1880s, Andrew discovered a quartz reef on the hills of the Old Man Range above the Clutha Valley. Unlike most gold mining ventures it prospered over a long period and John and Andrew, using skills they’d learned from their father, started to build the cottage below the mine. What is now the foundation was quarried for the building’s schist and as they worked meticulously they yet found time to carve, in situ, a solid sundial platform from rock in the garden.

John and his wife Jessie brought up ten children in Mitchells’ Cottage (while Andrew lived nearby, alternating between a small stone cottage close to the mine shaft and a smaller iron hut next to John and Jessies’) and although the mine was sold in 1890 and John died in 1922, the cottage stayed in Jessie’s ownership until 1929. It is now in the care of the Department of Conservation.

Schist stone fenceposts are a common sight in Central Otago; this one is in the garden of Mitchells’ Cottage.

© DON DONOVAN

St Bathans was born of a gold boom in 1863. A year later it had ten hotels, forty businesses and a population of up to 2000 in the surrounding hills and gullies. Across the road from the pub you can look down into ‘The Glory Hole’, a blue lake that was once a hill 120 metres high! Gold fever hit St Bathans in a big way and, blinded by the urge to win metal above everything else, the early citizens tolerated a mushroom shanty-town of ‘corrugated iron, red iron, tin, gin cases, staves and canvas’. But there seems to have been born into gold miners a need for dignity and a prayer for permanence and so, as the town survived into and beyond the 1870s, more substantial buildings appeared, some of them with sufficient stamina to have lasted into modern times.

St Bathans today is like a time capsule from which it’s possible, in just a couple of hours, to get an appreciation of the composition of a goldfields town: a public hall that was the miners’ billiards saloon, the Bank of New South Wales Gold Office of the late 1860s, the stately old Post Office and postmaster’s residence, the ruins of the 1866 public school, damaged irreparably by earthquake in 1948, the church of St Alban the Martyr given to the town by Captain Dalgety and shipped out, pre-fabricated from England in 1883, and the stone cottage, one of the earliest permanent buildings in the town, first occupied by Sam Hanger who owned the first Vulcan Hotel.

Bank of New South Wales Gold Office

There’s been a Vulcan in St Bathans since 1869. Sam Hanger’s first one was a little farther north than is today’s, an impermanent affair thrown up to cater for thirsts rather than architectural appreciation. Twelve years later, they replaced corrugated iron with a structure of sun-dried bricks that became the new Vulcan: it stood until early 1914 when it was burned down. In its turn it was replaced by red brick which was also destroyed by fire. The Vulcan’s licence was transferred at this time to the Ballarat Hotel, which was not in use. It had been built in 1882 and is the uniquely handsome little Vulcan Hotel in my illustration.

Through the left hand door is a narrow, intimate public bar and beyond that, the lounge bar. There are four accommodation rooms, one of which is said to be haunted. The hotel is owned by a company mainly consisting of local shareholders. I can’t think of a nicer place to hold a shareholders meeting.

© DON DONOVAN